Click Fraud Rises Again
February 2nd, 2007 by pamela
New figures from ClickForensics have shown that click fraud continued to rise in the last quarter of 2006, with the highest level all year being recorded.
The Click Fraud Index figures imply that the average click fraud rate was 14.2%, compared with 13.7%, 14.1% and 13.8% for the previous quarters respectively,
The report also found that the average click fraud rate of PPC ads appearing on content networks was 19.2% for Q4.
However, Google isn’t exactly in agreement, claiming that the actual click fraud rate is lower than 2%.
Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for Trust & Safety at Google, hit back on his personal blog, saying that the data was: “not at all representative of the actual statistics of our network.”
Ghosemajumder points out problems in the ClickForensics methodology, saying that Google had found serious flaws in their counting process, and that the “source of this problem is incorrectly counting page views – from users browsing through an advertiser’s site – as clicks.”
I think we can leave them to fight it out…
Posted in Paid Search, Stats & Research |
February 9th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
The problem with Google’s argument is that ClickForensics aren’t the only ones toting click fraud figures in the 10%+ range. Are they actually suggesting that all of these companies are making such a basic error in their methodology?
It’s important to take the middle ground here though. Click Fraud companies like ClickForensics have a vested interest in high click fraud figures as it helps sell their services. Google have a vested interest in low figures as they restore confidence in their product.
The truth is somewhere in between. Personally I think 15% is just too high a figure when you consider that most ads are so cheap that it wouldn’t be worthwhile. On the other hand 2% is far too low when you consider how rampant it clearly is in finance, travel, etc.
Coincidentally where are MSN and Yahoo’s comments? It’d be more interesting to see the main players’ views of their click fraud detection success rates alongside each other…